The Stable channel should be used by production clusters. Versions of Container Linux are battle-tested within the Beta and Alpha channels before being promoted. The current version is Container Linux 1465.8.0.

The Beta channel consists of promoted Alpha releases. The current version is Container Linux 1520.4.0.

The Alpha channel closely tracks master and is released frequently. The newest versions of system libraries and utilities will be available for testing. The current version is Container Linux 1535.2.0.

Container Linux releases are automatically built and deployed on the VEXXHOST cloud, therefore it is best to launch your clusters with the following naming pattern: CoreOS ChannelVersion. For example, the image name of the latest alpha release will be "CoreOS Alpha 1535.2.0".

Cloud-config

At the moment, you cannot supply the user-data using the CloudConsole control panel therefore you must use the CLI to deploy your cluster on the VEXXHOST cloud.

A sample common cloud-config file will look something like the following:

#cloud-configcoreos:etcd2:# generate a new token for each unique cluster from https://discovery.etcd.io/new?size=3# specify the initial size of your cluster with ?size=Xdiscovery:https://discovery.etcd.io/<token># multi-region and multi-cloud deployments need to use $public_ipv4advertise-client-urls:http://$private_ipv4:2379,http://$private_ipv4:4001initial-advertise-peer-urls:http://$private_ipv4:2380# listen on both the official ports and the legacy ports# legacy ports can be omitted if your application doesn't depend on themlisten-client-urls:http://0.0.0.0:2379,http://0.0.0.0:4001listen-peer-urls:http://$private_ipv4:2380,http://$private_ipv4:7001units:-name:etcd2.servicecommand:start-name:fleet.servicecommand:start

The $private_ipv4 and $public_ipv4 substitution variables are fully supported in cloud-config on VEXXHOST.

Launch cluster

You will need to install python-novaclient which supplies the OpenStack CLI tools as well as a keypair to use in order to access your Container Linux cluster.

Install OpenStack CLI tools

If you don't have pip installed, install it by running sudo easy_install pip. Now let's use pip to install python-novaclient.

$ sudo pip install python-novaclient

Add API credentials

You will need to have your API credentials configured on the machine that you're going to be launching your cluster from. The easiest way to do this is by logging into the CloudConsole control panel and clicking on "API Credentials".

From there, you must create a file on your system with the contents of the openrc file provided. Once done, you will need to source that file in your shell prior to running any API commands. You can test that everything is running properly by running the following command:

$ source openrc
$ nova credentials

Create keypair

You can import an existing public key by using the nova keypair-add command, however for this guide, we will be creating a new keypair and storing the private key for it locally and use it to access our Container Linux cluster.

$ nova keypair-add coreos-key > coreos.pem

Create servers

You should now be ready to launch the servers which will create your Container Linux cluster using the nova CLI command.

The Alpha channel closely tracks master and is released frequently. The newest versions of system libraries and utilities will be available for testing. The current version is Container Linux 1535.2.0.